The Relationship between Auditory Imagery and Musical Synchronization Abilities in Musicians

2009

Musical ensemble performance requires precise action coordination. To maintain synchrony in the presence of expressive tempo variations, musicians presumably anticipate the sounds that will be produced by their co-performers and coordinate their own anticipated actions with these predictions. Anticipatory auditory images in pitch and time may facilitate such predictions. Two experiments were conducted to examine the contribution of different aspects of auditory imagery abilities to sensorimotor synchronization (SMS) in musicians. In Experiment 1, the acuity of single-tone pitch images was measured by an adjustment method and by adaptive threshold estimation. Different types of finger tappin…